Johnson's folie de grandeur

[Celerity]

London is not only misrecognising the EU in its ‘no deal’ brinkmanship on Brexit. It is misrecognising the UK.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/johnsons-folie-de-grandeur

The UK government is once again threatening to walk away from negotiations on its future relationships with the European Union. Not only that: via anonymous briefings to credulous journalists, it has made two specific threats. The first is to pass domestic legislation which would override the Withdrawal Agreement it signed last year, specifically the Northern Ireland protocol. This was designed to allow EU law to prevail on state aid in Northern Ireland and mandates customs paperwork for goods exchanged between the region and the rest of the UK. Downing Street insiders have briefed that they will provocatively supersede it, ‘in full cognisance that this will breach international law’. The second threat is to impose restrictions on EU-based firms which try to raise finance in the global markets via London. According to the Sunday Express, a right-wing, pro-Brexit newspaper, ‘a dossier is being considered by Downing Street proposing that the EU could be punished for refusing to strike a deal by limiting access to being able to raise money on the London financial markets’.

Crunch point

The purpose of both threats is clear. Negotiations between the UK and EU have reached a crunch point but the differences are resolvable. There are two issues: one emotive, one major. The emotive issue is fishing rights. Since this is a straight question of quotas, any trained negotiator will tell you that it can be solved. The major issue is state aid. A Britain which for ideological reasons has always opposed public support for the private sector has suddenly discovered the desire to subsidise tech companies. As with all negotiations involving the prime minister, Boris Johnson, the bluff and bluster for Sunday papers is designed, first, for domestic consumption and, secondly, to confuse the negotiating partner.

My hunch is that Johnson will—at some point—stage a walkout, declaring a ‘no-deal’ Brexit, as a device to gain marginal advantage on fish, state aid or Northern Ireland. The two threats issued over the past days are designed to provide a casus belli for such a walkout. The Covid-19 slump has convinced many Tories that they can ‘bury’ the cost of a no-deal shock beneath the cost to the exchequer of dealing with the virus. The UK’s budget deficit for 2020 is predicted to be £320 billion—up from £57 billion last year. With deficits running at double the previously predicted figures for the next five years, the UK will end up with a ratio of debt to gross domestic product above 100 per cent. So no deal is a gesture they are prepared to make, even if only for the chance to shore up Johnson’s electoral base, which has been crumbling due to his disastrous handling of the pandemic.

‘Sovereignty’

But the underlying problem for the UK, as the Tories are finding out the hard way, is ‘sovereignty’. The slogan ‘take back control’ was what motivated 52 per cent of its citizens to support Leave in the 2016 referendum, and the promise of it helped Johnson to a landslide in the Westminster election last December. The mantra—‘take back control of our money, our borders and our laws’—has been drilled into Tory politicians. Yet ‘sovereignty’ no longer resides in money, borders or even laws. It exists in a reality constructed out of standards—in technology, trade, finance, agriculture, intellectual property and consumer goods—which in the EU are shared. Under John’s predecessor, Theresa May, the Tory dream was that, by breaking free of all mutually agreed standards, the UK could become ‘Singapore on Thames’. It would be a low-tax, deregulated economy leveraging its advantage against a more regulated and more redistributive EU—not just in finance but in technology, research, services and manufacturing.

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